Ordinarily I wouldn’t post up a bunch of stuff that I encountered on YouTube, but this collection of one persons account of his deconversion from Christianity to Atheism is so thoughtfully considered and carefully presented that I was absolutely captivated, and would like to share it.

The concept of God is, for most believers, an aggregate of other beliefs. There is no silver bullet, single argument, that will disavow a believer of the God concept. For the author, his belief was built upon

1. logical arguments (exemplified by Schroeder’s The Science of God).
2. answered prayers.
3. God as the source of morality.
4. Life as a testament to the creator.
5. The Bible as the divine word, full of wisdom.
6. The supporting testimony of other Christians.
7. The personal relationship with God, and personal experiences of God.

The big issue with prayer is that the likelihood of having a prayer answered is proportional to the likelihood of that event occurring even without supernatural intercession. Prayer, in a sense, puts a person in the driving seat with respect to an omniscient God. It should be better to figure out what God’s will is directly, rather than plead for what we’d like to have happen. Scientific evidence points out that prayer has no positive effect on patients recovery. [Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer American Heart Journal, Volume 151, Issue 4, Pages 934-942 H. Benson, J. Dusek, J. Sherwood, P. Lam, C. Bethea, W. Carpenter, S. Levitsky, P. Hill, D. Clem, Jr., M. Jain] The traditional dichotomy of “yes”, “no” and “wait” responses that can be received from God in answer to prayer, is entirely psychological.

How can the Bible contain all of God’s Possible Knowledge, if it can’t answer very specific questions such as those regarding dating or personal life objectives. The Holy Spirit, helps by stepping in and filling those gaps. A university class in Professional Ethics, however, completely changed his mind. A text for the class included Being Good, by Simon Blackburn. The professor focused more on ‘how do we make good decisions’, and didn’t reveal his biases during the presentation of dilemmas. In regards to God, he raised the Euthyphro Dilemma, taking the position that Divine Command Theory is bankrupt, because it would allow obviously bad things (rape, murder, pillaging) to ‘become’ good by God’s command. Thus, morality is separate from God, and not a derivative of His command. Do you do good things because you want to be good, or to get into heaven? If you want to be good for its own sake, then you must do the moral footwork, and not delegate this responsibility to God, be threatened by eternal punishment in Hell, or bribed by eternal salvation in Heaven.

There is a discord between the Bible and Science. Genesis is debunked by Big Bang Theory, age of the Earth, Theory of Evolution, Rainbows after the Flood, etc. Schroeder initially offered a reasonable time-frame that allowed compatibility between these magisteria. A post about the book on Amazon was responded to by a professor, claiming that none of the scientific evidences above, are solved by a relativistic time shift. The professor had changed his own mind about God after using the personal library of Ramon Menendez Pidal to vet that the Bible was the result of construction of several previous sources. [Who Wrote the New Testament: The Making of the Christian Myth by Burton L. Mack, and A History of God by Karen Armstrong both provide good layman references to this fact.] Schroeder’s book is an example of extrallusory intelligence.

The professor alerts our author to the tactic of reverse terminology, and shows that “The doctrinal underpinnings of the Bible have been known to be mythological for centuries.” (as shown by Some Mistakes of Moses by Robert Ingersoll, who recounts the conflict between historical linguistics and the Tower of Babel). This conversation evolves, and the professor moves to remove himself from the conversation to avoid inevitable disenchantment, advising not to worry about religious details too much. The author reflects that many of his congregation are not on the path to Truth, and likely fear the dark waters and questions in which he travels, turning their backs on Truth (but he has nevertheless learned spiritual lessons from them).

The Bible clearly offers explanations for why educated people reject god (Romans 1:22). He kept many verses as guidance through his life, but hadn’t actually read the Book from cover to cover. In Genesis, he encountered stories with immoral behavior by God’s characters, and inconsistent punishment for such actions. Hardening Pharaoh’s heart and killing all the firstborn sons violates both freedom and justice. Exodus and Leviticus are found to be full of incredibly detailed rules about sacrifice and offerings, no longer necessary since Jesus’s death. Numbers and Deuteronomy are also full of tedious details, and legalistic jumbo, that Christians with the Holy Spirit don’t need. Some details are fond to be inconsistent: in particular, God’s wrath concerning Judas in Acts is now an account of remorseful self-infliction in Matt). Apologetics is found to be somewhat contorted logic to rescue these inconsistencies.

Our author is now well on his way to using secular learnings as his moral and ethical guide, rather than lessons from the Bible. The Amazon professor, holds the position that many of these stories are incredibly preposterous (Order of Creation, Two different accounts, Noah’s Ark vs actual number of species, God’s command to kill children (Deut 20:16)) Questioning God’s word is still very uncomfortable for our author, as the Bible was communicated directly from God, and comes to us, unedited. But translation is not the problem, for the Bible was written by various authors each with political aims to reconstruct (edit) history. This is the Documentary Hypothesis (The Bible with Sources Revealed by Richard Friedman). The Bible is now no longer an infallible source of Truth.

The author reveals that God is attributed, fortuitous coincidence, beauty, numinous experience, etc, and given credit for all that is good. The Holy Spirit is recognized as a voice different from his own, providing guidance and inspiration unlike his own conscience. Religion is the metaphor through which he understands his personal experiences. Failure in daily activities guide our author to a stronger devotion to his faith, yet in college the material is now found to be unsurmountable, even with stronger devotion. Speaking with atheists becomes his new motivation, for it alone now brings feelings of God’s will.

Even if the Bible is not the word of God, having directly communicated reveals that God exists. The Amazon Professor, in respectful observance, neither denies the authors sincerity, nor agrees. Persistence leads our author to continue the the conversation. The logical arguments are battered back and forth, and the professor begins teaching: given what we know, God is just a concept, and personal interaction with Him is a simulacrum. The God concept gives the believer a surrogate parent.

Finally the author concedes that it is possible, the history/creation of the universe, the construction of religion, the lack of positive intercessory prayer, the (im)moral behavior of individuals, the independence of morality from God etc, the personal revelations, all can happed without God. The carefully considered evidence from the Professor, leads our author to see that all these things are explainable without resort to God. Occam’s Razor leads the author from “it is possible that there is no God” to “there is no God”.

For a couple of months now I’ve know that Ray Comfort plans on distributing a republication of Darwin’s Origin of Species on many North American campuses. I took quite some time out to write a rebuttal to all of the fallacious arguments that he makes in his Introduction so that AAR could use it to hand out during the time that Comfort is distributing his republication. I eventually realized, after not getting very far, that I’d end up with a rebuttal longer than his original Introduction. In lieu of all the tireless work and effort that it would take to address everything in length I’ve decided instead to write a summary of the primary mistakes.

The Libertarian think tank CATO recently published a small, trite piece that attempts to establish The Case against Literary (and Software) Patents. Being a Libertarian, I actually agree with the position; I just don’t think that this article fully explored the issue. Here, I seek to provide some links to more fundamental content.

It begins with the hypothetical existence of a ‘Literature patent’. I consider such an idea to be terrible at face value, and the article actually dismisses it as much. It would be ridiculous to expect every author to carefully comb over their work making sure that it doesn’t infringe on any registered plots or (worse!) plot devices (good buy holodeck!) Acquiring knowledge of registered patents would be prohibitive for a beginning author, they’d have to rely on publishers/editors. This significantly raises the cost of creating an innovative work. Not to mention the human effort the government must spend to maintain consistency in it’s patent database, and the legal costs and liabilities for the inevitable infringement.

The article then proceeds to demonstrate what happens in patentable areas. Immediately, there is a land grab on the ‘low hanging fruit’. During this process, established market leaders tend to benefit, because the have the resources (both funds and people) to make a large number of claims and file the required paperwork (economics of scale apply to paper shuffling too). Typically only a relatively few companies will be successful in this endeavor. The initial grab might also appear to be an ‘economic stimulus’, as it will show a remarkably steep and sudden interest in the field, resulting from the underlying similarity of the tragedy of the commons. After the market settles, a few incumbents then use their patent portfolios to threaten up-start competition. As the article points out, in the world of software patents, so much of the field is so obvious, that agents without an explicit interest in software will find themselves infringing as a normal course of their business but will be without their own patent portfolio and unable to make a bargaining counter-threat.

Another economic phenomenon that happens as a result of the patent system’s existence is economic stalemate. This actually happened with the sewing machine, as recorded by Adam Mossoff in A Stitch in Time: The Rise and Fall of the Sewing Machine Patent Thicket, which was blogged about at the Volokh Conspiracy. He recounts how the marketing and distribution of the sewing machine was actually encumbered by the patent system, because the machine required the combination of several innovations, and no single agent held all patents on the functionality. History also demonstrates the practice of ‘patent trolling’, whereby a company, which doesn’t actually produce anything, seeks to profit by legal threats of infringement and licensing agreements on its patent portfolio. The resulting stalemate was finally resolved through the explicit creation of a patent-holding company, whose sole function was to share the patents and resulting profits of all involved manufacturing firms.

So we can see that for areas where copyright is already established practice, the introduction of an extension of the patent system results in litigation and paperwork and encourages the preservation of an established regime of a few powerful companies working in loose collusion, both of which tend to outweigh any potential benefits to development and innovation

Now, I’d like to go out on a limb here, and reject the very concept of ‘Intellectual Property’. Richard Stallman has spoken out against its use, and continuously advertises the fact that it’s deceptive and misleading. At the root of the issue is that ideas and physical matter behave differently. That is, copying != stealing. The reasoning behind this position is fairly simple, when an idea is copied that does not deprive the original possessor from the idea. When you tell me about your theory of X, you don’t suddenly forget after telling me. In contrast, if you give me an apple, now you no longer have that apple. Ideas are part of a different realm of existence.

Finally, I’d like to point out the slippery slope, what happens if we go too far with this property idea: we might lose The Right to Read, or watch How creativity is being strangled by the law.

I hope that through these references, you can see where, how, and why I’ve developed my position on the patent issue; I’m firmly on the side of maximum freedom (and that includes the opening up of all media: open-music, open-software, open-hardware, open-design, open-architecture, open-video, open-government, open-literature, etc…)

Today I stumbled across a somewhat recent post by Luskin of the infamous Discovery Institute. Luskin observes some comments made by Eugenie Scott, in regard to how scientists should portray their results, so as not to be pounced upon by the creationists. He accuses Scott of instructing scientists to “spin it [changes in science] positively and never acknowledge they were wrong”. Worse, he concludes with:

When scientists in a field are instructed to avoid publicly admiting when they’re wrong, and are advised that improving the public’s perception of science is not best served by doing better science, then you know that field is steeped in intolerance towards dissent, and political pressure to give assent to orthodoxy. These are not the signs of a healthy science.

Which, while technically an accurate statement, is very misleading in this context. When we look at what Scott actually said, she’s effectively counseling scientists to be careful about their phrasing. Importantly, those working in evolution should avoid hyperbole about their discoveries. She wants scientists to be aware of the following problem:

So people get confused when scientists discover things and change ideas?

Yes, all the time. This is one of the real confusions about evolution. Creationists have done a splendid job of convincing the public that evolution is weak science because scientists are always changing their minds about things.

So, Luskin (and other creationists) are actually responsible for Eugenie’s reaction! They’ve been pouncing all over science, politicizing evolution with a “Teach the controversy” campaign and continuous whining about “being blacklisted from the journals”. They’ve been rejected from journals because they have no falsifiable claims, nor associated experiments; they then tried to push the creationism into schools, but were thrown out in the Scope’s Monkey Trial and again in Dover, Pennsylvania; and now they’ve jumped on an “equal-time in science classrooms” even though the comparison is akin to astrology vs astronomy.

This has really gone on for long enough that Eugenie feels she must remind scientists that:

What’s the current state of the effort to keep schools teaching evolution?

Sometimes it feels like the Red Queen around here, where we’re running as hard as we can to stay in the same place. The thing is, creationism evolves. And for every victory we have, there’s pressure on the creationists to change their approach. We constantly have to shift our response. Ultimately the solution to this problem is not going to come from pouring more science on it.

What should scientists and people who care about science do?

I’m calling on scientists to be citizens. American education is decentralized. Which means it’s politicized. To make a change … you have to be a citizen who pays attention to local elections and votes [for] the right people. You can’t just sit back and expect that the magnificence of science will reveal itself and everybody will … accept the science.

Though Luskin takes warps these comments to imply that science itself isn’t healthy, he should be reminded that the whole political situation is the fault of the creationists! They’ve got a strategic attack with the Wedge Document that’s mostly taken the scientific community by surprise. Then, when scientists make outrageous claims (like when New Scientist had a cover proclaiming Darwin was Wrong) the creationists blow it all out of proportion. That’s why Eugenie is recommending that scientists not try for these kinds of claims; it’s inaccurate and the distortion is too easily inflated by creationist cohorts.

So, Luskin, like all creationists before him, has once again reversed cause and effect and confused his premise and conclusion. It’s not that science is dogmatic because Scott has to encourage carefully worded discoveries; It’s that the political climate surrounding evolution has become so highly charged that it can no longer tolerate the hyperbole that scientists naturally inject into their claims to sell their importance to other scientists. And the entire problem was manufactured by the creationists! And Luskin continues to flame the distortion in his post that prompted this whole rant.

Oh, and one more thing: Any time that a creationist claims the Earth was created in 6,000 years, point them over to Yes, Millions of Years! and then ask who’s rejecting what evidence!

Of course, I would never think that I was the only one to have the idea of studying computer languages from a linguistics point of view. Well, I found an interesting character, by the name of Chris Barker that gave an interesting keynote at POPL in 2004. He’s mentioned in a recent LtU discussion about the “Influence of cognitive models on programming language design”. Unlike most linguists, that get branched off into anthropology and soft models of cognition, Barker really knows what he’s talking about when it comes to formal models. He even has an (interactive!) tutorial on lambda calculus.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to scare up any recording of his keynote, but the abstract is available.

Linguists seek to understand the semantics of expressions in human languages. Taking a computational point of view, there are many natural language expressions—operators in the wild, so to speak— that control evaluation in ways that are familiar from programming languages: just think of the natural-language counterparts of if, unless, while, etc. But in general, how well-behaved are control operators found in the wild? Can we always understand them in terms of familiar programming constructs, or do they go significantly beyond the expressive power of programming languages?

I’d love to take a whole class devoted to this kind of stuff!

Yesterday, I attended a structured debate between William Lane Craig and The Hitch held at Biola University. As far as anyone can win a debate where the opponents talk mostly at cross-purposes, I’d have to give the trophy to Craig. Clearly, my belief system is biased towards Hitchens, yet I feel that he did an inadequate job as an atheist spokesman.

Firstly, the pamphlet that was handed out prior to the show, had a nice listing of Craig’s main arguments, while the space given to Hitchens was entirely blank (useful for notes, but couldn’t he come up with any written opposition? he didn’t even use the space to repeat his challenge?) Before commenting further on the speakers presentation, I’m going to review the arguments used by Craig.

• Cosmological Argument
  1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
  2. The Universe began to exist.
  3. Therefore, the Universe has a cause.

  The underlying problem here is that, this argument assumes the Law of Causality. Unfortunately, if (as Craig claimed during the debate) the Big Bang was the beginning of both space and time, exploding the universe ex nihilo then it no longer makes sense to talk about ‘before’ the Bang. You see, the very term ‘before’ implies a continuity of time, and it doesn’t make sense to talk about anything ‘before’ time. This is true too of causality, which depends on continuity of time, so we can no longer talk about events causing other events, when there is no universe of time and space in which these things occur. So, premise 1. is inadmissible, and we cannot then conclude that the universe had a cause.

• Teleological Argument
  1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either law, chance, or design.
  2. It is not due to law or chance.
  3. Therefore, it is due to design.

  Ignoring the possibility that he has set up a false or incomplete set of choices in premise 1., Craig appealed to the authority of physicists and their testimony that the probability that fundamental physical constants that parameterize our universe have values capable of supporting life such as we observe is vanishingly small. Because of this, the universe could not have been tuned by accident. Nor could it have been by law, because these are initial conditions and are not covered by scientific law. Therefore, our only option left is design.
  Craig also made some detours suggesting that if you were to ally with chance, then you would be forced into conceding the possibility of a multi-verse theory, which he dismissed as being really very silly. I actually agree with this. The multi-verse theories are neither well grounded, nor empirically observed, and smell as if they came from science fiction; but I really don’t have many other options (though there is the Anthropic Principal). I still don’t think an appeal to supernaturalism solves the problem. It’s weak as far as explanations are concerned, for now we must question “Why was the universe created, and what was it designed for?”, and I don’t see any means of empirically testing answers to such questions. I agree that science doesn’t provide very satisfactory answers to why the universe is capable of supporting life as we know it, but God did it. is a non-answer!

• Moral Argument
  1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
  2. Objective moral values do exist.
  3. Therefore, God exists.

  Unfortunately I don’t quite remember what Craig termed ‘objective moral values’ but it wasn’t what I expected: moral values that can be objectively or empirically measured. Rather, it seemed that he used a definition that nearly presupposed a universal standard of morality which must have been inserted by a God into the fabric of our being. I really wish I could remember his exact words here, but I think he had buried his conclusion into the premises. I do remember that he dismissed objectively measurable moral values as not being truly moral. That is, he didn’t think that atheists had any real logical reason to discount, say cannibalism, other than the fact that it doesn’t allow the formation of large, stable societies (which isn’t itself a moral precept). On this point, he’s absolutely right. Atheists can’t claim an objective or universal set of moral scriptures, we are forced to admit that much of morality is relative, that we’re figuring it out as we go, that advances in technology force us to reconsider some of the relative balances, that fundamentally there are no moral standards, and we are forced, by nature as evolved social primates, to adopt those values that allow us to best get along with each other. But, this position draws doubt on premise 2.

• The Resurrection of Jesus
  1. There are three established facts concerning the fate of Jesus of Nazareth: (a) the discovery of his empty tomb, (b) his post-mortem appearances, and (c) the origin of his disciples’ belief in his resurrection.
  2. The hypothesis “God raised Jesus from the dead” is the best explanation of these facts.
  3. The hypothesis “God raised Jesus from the dead” entails that the God revealed by Jesus of Nazareth exists.
  4. Therefore, the God revealed by Jesus of Nazareth exists.

  I actually this that this argument is completely beside the point. But it is useful from Craig’s side in making the leap from a God to a personal God of the Bible. Hitchens failed to take this on, except in a very wishy-washy fashion arguing that any God who is capable of intervening must be an immoral one. To presume that God had a design which includes the extinction of 99% of all species ever to have lived, the annihilation of galactic expanses in supernovae, black holes and other cosmic dangers, the revelation to a primitive, illiterate desert people without good recording devices, the inhumane and unwarranted suffering cause by natural disaster and disease, and then to claim “but he cares about you” is not at all humble. Rather, it’s presumptuous and immoral. He also added, that as far as prayer for personal intervention, at least as an Atheist, “I can’t be accused of wishful thinking”.

• The Immediate Experience of God
  1. Beliefs which are appropriately grounded may be rationally accepted as basic beliefs not grounded in argument.
  2. Belief that the biblical God exists is appropriately grounded.
  3. Therefore, belief that the biblical God exists may be rationally accepted as a basic belief not grounded in argument.

  This one is very easy, and I wish that Dan Barker could have been there to address it. Having an experience doesn’t prove the existence of God, it only proves that humans have such experiences.

Overall, Craig was extremely well spoken, and his points were well-delivered. When he presented the Atheistic viewpoints, he didn’t set-up a strawman. Hitchens, in contrast, appealed to emotion (which doesn’t always work on a Christian biased audience) and failed to address Craig on a logical, structured, point-by-point basis. He let a number of the easy quibbles fly, he let Craig leap from Deist to personal God, he never raised the point that our current morality is better than that of the Old Testament God, nor did he contend that it’s up to the supernaturalist to provide proof, he persisted in alluding that Christianity held a deeply depraved view of us as wretched sinners and strayed from the premise of the debate “Does God Exists”. I’ve seen Hitchens do much better in other venues, even when espousing the exact same arguments! He was an unfortunate disappointment.

I think Craig is setting a very good bar for logical debate. He stayed on topic, and was very straightforward. I wish that all Christians would follow his standard, so that my side might have the opportunity to win the ongoing debate with clear and sound reason. Many of Craigs arguments are available in his book “Does God Exist?” (unfortunately listing Antony Flew (who swapped from atheist to deist to christian as old age took its toll) as a co-author.)

Tonight I attended a nice speech, Q+A, and Booksigning given by the President of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Dan Barker. His talk was basically the same as one that can be found elsewhere online, but I took notes anyway. Most of the stuff that he talks about is contained in his book, Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists.

• The fastest growing religion in America is Non-religion. The number of checkmarks in that box has risen rapidly, more than doubled in recent years.
• Atheist and non-believer groups are growing. They are sprouting up like mushrooms, and no single organization is behind it. This is good, it means that people are waking up, and questioning.
• Suddenly there’s been this new market for Atheist literature. It used to be that a publisher wouldn’t touch the stuff, now a few are actively seeking it. Some bookstores have it as a whole section
• Mentioned his book, and some nice blurbs. Thought that there should be something like an anti-blurb. Ex. Hannity or Bill O’Reilly saying “Do not read this book. It will corrupt the soul of America.
• Shared a piece of the forward written by Richard Dawkins. It’s about the weirdest compliment he’s ever received.
• Unlike Hitchens and Dawkins who were never really believers, His book is about an actual conversion, and explains what goes on in the mind of a True Believer.
• As a believer, He was convinced that it was the end times. That his obligation was to preach the word to all of God’s children. He was chosen, at the right time, in the right city, in the right country, to be a soldier for God. He preached in the streets, and it was your lucky day to sit next to him on the bus (though you might not have known it).
• Mentions that crude proselytizing works! You look at a person and say “I can tell you’re having real struggles. That you’re having a problem with a personal relationship.” The listener will be uncertain, and since the preacher is smiling and confident, people lay down their guard and give men of God automatic respect.
• As a minister, he was seeing miracles, Pentecostal hand healing, Living in God’s light.
• Churches love to put up the animated youngsters, it gets everyone excited, attracts more believer.
• Anecdote: He had a friend, that was called on to preach. But had lost his voice right before it was his turn. They huddled, he reasoned that the Bible says believer will be healed, not maybe, not eventually but here and now, so he exclaimed “By the power of Jesus, I heal your voice.” His friend was suddenly able to talk, and gave his sermon. Now he knows this type of thing to be confirmation bias. It would be a true miracle if prayers were never ever answered. Rather when they aren’t it’s not remembered or the memory is transferred, God’s teaching me a lesson about patience. Much later, he was told by a doctor that sometimes when people are nervous, their vocal cords and throat can become restricted, and they loose their voice. This might have been the case.
• As minister, he was really trusting his whole life in the hands of the Lord. He had no savings, no plans for the future, and lived from day-to-day, always hoping that collected donations at the end of his sermons could get him to the next preaching. He really believed that it was the end times, and that God would provide.
• He eventually got into doing christian music. Did an album. Mary had a Little Lamb. Which, theologically, refers to the virgin Mary giving birth to the Lamb of God. This developed into a nice career, and he started doing music events and record production.
• Not all of these events matched his belief system. He was a Biblical Literalist. Jesus said (Rev. 3:16) “But since you are lukewarm and not hot or cold, I’m going to spit you out of my mouth.” Things are really black and white in the mind of a Fundie. None of this metaphor stuff.
• But since the people he met were mostly really nice people, his theology started to shift. He reasoned that a difference of opinion (Adam and Eve being historically real vs an Israelite parable) shouldn’t divide the community. Even though he was shocked by this grayness.
• Eventually, in his deconversion, he realized that there are probably as many different types of Christianity as there are Christians.
• Paul said “God is not the author of confusion.” Yet can you think of any other book that has caused more confusion?
• As a travelling evangelist, the people he met were nice and caring. They weren’t evil, yet they also didn’t believe exactly as he did. He met enough people that eventually his brain started working. Like the environment of a Liberal University, the diversity got him thinking.
• The frontal lobes of the brain are the last to fixate their wiring, especially for men. He suddenly experienced a hunger for knowledge, rather than feelings. His brain felt starved, he started questioning, reading, learning, science, philosophy, evolution, humanism, liberal christianity, completely other points of view and theologies.
• His sermons migrated from preachings about Hell and the afterlife to Love and the good that should be done in this life.
• But Jesus never came down from the heavens.
• He learned that in every generation, even at the time of Jesus, there was a subset that believed it was the end-times. Paul thought this. (a few digs at Jehovah’s Witness’s for repeatedly giving dates) But it never happened. He realized that it was never gonna happen.
• Anecdote, about seeing a sign in one of the churches, near the rafters. Cobwebs in the corner, paint peeling. It says “Jesus Coming Soon.”
• He can still speak in tongues. Reasons that the susceptibility to mysticism is a natural part of being human, that there’s probably a bell curve. That the feelings are a function of the brain. Dopamine, love-making, laughing, chocolate, enjoyment is about the brain. Coupled with a belief system this allows people a false, but no less powerful, confirmation.
• If anyone was a True Believe he was. He felt it, it was never fake, it was all real experience, but realizes now that it wasn’t the gift of a superpower.
• He converted to Atheism all by himself. There wasn’t an atheist evangelist on TV, nor a visitor at his door. It was all by his own reasoning.
• If the prodigal son was a parable, and Adam and Even a metaphor, then maybe God himself was a figure of speech? Where do you draw the line? What parts do you choose to be literal vs. metaphor? Where’s the evidence?
• So he looked at the different denominations, what all the different religions had to say, what science had to say. He never intended to reject his beliefs, but wanted to find truth, and had a real hunger for knowledge.
• He experienced a voice in his head: “somethings wrong with the way you think.” It wasn’t the Holy Ghost, but the voice of Reason, and it kept getting louder and louder.
• Made a pact with himself about seeking Truth instead of God, following reason rather than feelings (faith). Would look at the evidence, even if it lead him away from God. It’s what he would want for a Muslim. For them to rise above their belief and culture.
• The eyeball of objective rationality that the was using to parse the world suddenly got turned on him. He sought other reasons for stuff, and received no evidence for God.
• Reasoned that if something must be taken of faith, then admitting such is demonstrating that it can’t be taken by evidence.
• He dumped out the bathwater, and discovered that there was no baby. He was not convinced by any of the arguments (not the moral argument, argument by personal experience, ontological argument, argument by design, etc..)
• Saw that there was no coherent definition of God, that there’s no solution to the problem of Evil, that there’s no coherent definition of morality. Just walk into any children’s hospital to see that there is no God. Why would these innocents be suffering, what are some spared while others are taken?
• Realized that without God he could still lead a meaningful, moral, productive life.
• At first he was a private atheist. It was his own freethinking that lead him this way, nobody else was responsible for coercing him.
• Anecdote: He was alone in his chair looking at the stars, and it hit him. He was alone. Truly alone, there was no all-powerful observer with him. He was free. Saw the stars as natural bodies of gas consuming their elements, eventually dying out. Saw himself as a similar organism.
• But he would still rather know truth, than fool himself into happiness.
• He still had speaking engagements, so for 4 months, he was a real hypocrite. Giving sermons about a God he knew wasn’t there. One time, he had a woman come up to him and declare how she had felt the power of God in his sermon. His experience was completely different.
• The last sermon/concert (at Christmastime) that he went to had a village atheist. Everyone in town really liked him, and were concerned that he wasn’t saved. During the event he wanted to just stop all the hypocrisy and come clean, out himself. But he didn’t, instead went through the performance as an act of showmanship. Afterwards there was a reception, where someone toasted “Isn’t it nice that we can all come together to celebrate the birth of our Lord.” The lone atheist interjected loudly: “Not all of us”, and Dan felt good.
• He used to think it was tough being a christian in the world. Yet try being an atheist, a lone voice of reason that nobody wants to listen to.
• He wrote and sent out a letter to his friends and family about his atheism. Writing it all out was a positive act (unlike praying). He received some nice letters from some friends, and some not-so-nice letters from people he thought were his friends.
• He still had a couple christian songs to write, as he was under a contract. His employer, didn’t care that he was atheist, and still needed the songs. His craftsmanship was still good, and they were publish in the album Sonrise Island under the pseudonym Edwin Daniels. He still receives royalties.
• His mom and dad eventually became atheist, which was unexpected. She had been a sunday school teacher, but flew out to talk about his new belief. When she got back, she never went into another church again. His dad took longer (2 years), as he was teaching seminary.
• Realized that he didn’t have to hate anymore.
• His youngest brother heard the news, and was “Me Too!”. But then he was never a hard-core christian anyhow. He thinks there are many people like this, that harbor internal doubts but that would give up their pretending if they had an example to lead them.

After the talk there was a Q+A session. A number of people asked about specific court cases that the FFRF is handling, I didn’t record those.

• Why didn’t you bring a guitar to have jam session? Well, he has some cd’s like Beware of Dogma.
• What does your organization focus on? They work to keep church and state separate, and educate the public about the views of non-believers. They have full-time staff to challenge Bush’s faith-based initiative, and religious symbology used in government functions. There’s a lawsuit about God being mentioned in the Inauguration. They are also joined by many religious groups, and newspapers are editorally in favor of their actions. They run billboards and other ads to raise awareness.
• Doesn’t going after a nativity scene encourage negative publicity? In Washinton state, the legislature was pressured into allowing a nativity scene that the governor had previously rejected as inappropriate for a government building (indeed, this broke tradition as there had never been one before). After that the atheists decided that they’d get a sign that used rather strong wording for the Winter Solstice. Then dozens of others wanted signs too! Pastafarians, Festivus, etc… It caused such an uproar, they’ll never make the mistake of allowing such a scene again.
• Do you ever miss the certainty of Fundamentalism? He needed time to adjust, early on he had nostalgia. But ultimately, he doesn’t miss it. Thinks it’s really dangerous in some ways. The recognition of uncertainty is what drives science, he’s not denying religious experience.
• Since the value of a story is usually discussed in human terms, should we promote the idea that religion is a part of the human experience? Well religious people often play this game of “Love the sinner, Hate the sin.” We can play that too. Sure there’s room for ridiculing, but it’s not an argument that’ll sway everyone.
• Before you were proselytizing, now you give regular speeches. Are you still the same way on the Bus? He’s still the same kind of guy, but it’s really toned down alot. He’s more courteous, but still takes every opportunity. Once at an airport he bought some food that rang up $6.66, and exclaimed “That’s the perfect number for an atheist.” The person behind him shared the amusement. Just as with the gay movement, the more people that are out, the easier it’ll be for everyone.
• Are you absolutely certain there is no God? Well, philosophically no. He can’t be. He’s not absolutely certain there are no Leprechauns, they could be hiding. But he is certain that the personal God of the bible doesn’t exist. It has too many qualifiers and is logically inconsistent. As for the more abstract notions, the confidence level achieved by lack of evidence is high enough that we round up and say “God does not exist.” But this is no more absolute than any other thing in science. It’s not out of commitment to a particular worldview, we’re not hiding from acknowledgment. It’s just it’s an extraordinary claim with no evidence.
• Have your ethics changed at all? On balance no. Most christians are good moral people, in spite of the Bible. He is more concerned though about issues such as women’s rights, oppression of minorities, etc. Thinks that we should judge people by their actions rather than their beliefs. If a religious behavior is causing harm then we should intervene (in accordance with the severity of the harm).
• Where do you draw the line on that?Morality is about minimizing harm. It’s not a system of rules that are blindly followed. It’s relative and contextual. For example stabbing a child with a big needle is wrong, unless it needs a life-saving injection. Though not everyone will feel the same way about certain actions, we are obligated to at least denounce things like child abuse, and only interfere if the harm is great enough that it can cause real damage (christian science people not taking children to the hospital.)
• From someone doing research on the perception of atheism and religiosity of the general public. Do you think that Fundamentalist consider atheists immoral/amoral? Where would you say morals come from? Well, first we can empirically point out that christians behave no more morally than non-believers (there have been social studies on this). We have the same rate of divorce, drug use, watch X-rated movies, same amount of crime, and atheists are underrepresented in prisons. So moral behavior is partially genetic. There are mechanisms in the brain that make altruism feel good. But not everyone has the same level of instinct about these things, so we can’t all fall back on an intrinsic sense of morality. Still, morals aren’t handed down to us, we are social animals and figure out this stuff as we grow up, we receive ethical training from our environment. Because we are following moral precepts/principals and not rules, we also have an obligation to be informed, so as to minimize our mistakes.
• When you were young, why did you decide to persue ministry? In the Bible it says that faith comes through hearing, so it’s important to go out and preach. He really believed that we were all born as sinners, and that we needed the forgiveness of Jesus. You don’t have to have these feelings to preach, but he did. He also had confirmation: The Bible says that you shall know them by their fruits, and his life had all that; people responded positively to his ministry, it was never an act of deception. But doubts crept in and eventually he had to choose: Truth or God.
• How has your perception of atheists changed between now and the height of your religiosity? He didn’t really know any atheists then. It was an abstract concept. He just knew that because they were without God they would have to be arrogant, evil, blind, deceived by Satan, etc. He was against it in principal, but didn’t know anyone in particular. The lack of specifics means he really didn’t have a good understanding. Now he recognizes that we’re all just people, not terribly different from each other, each trying to improve the world in their own way.
• Since you left in 1983, do you think that Christianity has gotten stronger? In most ways, no. They know they’ve been loosing. Lost on all the major issues, Women’s rights, birth control, interracial marriage. Loosing on creationism, and soon homosexual marriage. Their political power has been terribly over-representative and it too is waning. It now seems like they’re trying to take down everyone else with them. Their anger is actually a sign of our success.
• During your conversion to atheism, which questions did you find most convincing? The design argument. Was convinced by the argument present in one of Dawkins’ books. If a complex thing was designed, then it requires a designer even more complex. But why stop at God? should ask who/what designed God? But if God needs no designer, then why should we? He realized that much of his thinking was exactly backwards. Repeated the example by Julia Sweeney about human hands being perfectly designed to fit in gloves. He also misunderstood evolution. He thought it was a directed process or force that was always pushing progress. Also, recognizing contradictions, exaggerations, inaccuracies in the Bible was a big push. As a Fundie, he would either have had to reject it entirely, or pretend they didn’t exist through contortions of justification and theology.
• Have you found it problematic that your change of mind might undermine your sincerity or imply a loss of credibility? Before many of his conclusions were based on faith. Now they’re based on reason. He’s not asking anyone to trust him as an authority. Most atheists say “don’t trust me” and promote thinking for oneself, following the logic, etc. He doesn’t require credibility, to promote freethinking.
• How did you deal with the contradictions as a Biblical Literalist? First they were never pointed out. He assumed they didn’t exist, and would never himself have noticed such an imperfection. Second, even if it was pointed out, he could have claimed any number of things, like the out-of-context defense. Also, as a preacher, nobody asks you for your sources of information, or references. After his conversion, he found some of these contradictions and thought “How did I miss that?”. He’s convinced that anyone can perform reinterpretations, treat passages as metaphor, patch up the logic, etc. Yet that inventiveness doesn’t get around the fact that the Bible is contradictory, unhistorical, contains exaggerations (untruths), numerical errors, immoral behavior (even by God), human tampering, interpolations, it’s just plain unreliable; another book, written by humans. Glad that he doesn’t have to focus so much on it anymore.

Yesterday a very interesting speaker, Eric Hehner, gave a talk at the graduate seminar:

TITLE

A Probability Perspective

ABSTRACT

This talk could be called “probability meets programming”. It draws together four perspectives that contribute to a new understanding of probability and solving problems involving probability. The first is the Subjective Bayesian perspective that probability is affected by ones knowledge, and that it is updated as ones knowledge changes. The problem of assigning prior probabilities is mitigated by the Information Theory perspective, which equates probability with information. The main point of the talk is that the formal perspective (formalize, calculate, unformalize) is beneficial to solving probability problems. And finally, the programmer’s perspective provides us with a suitable formalism.

I found the talk extremely fascinating. He first compared measures of probability, entropy, and information, demonstrating that they were (in a sense) substitutable concepts (analogous with Energy and Mass, or Energy and Temperature).

b bits	=	2b states	=	2-b chance
log(s) bits	=	s states	=	1/s states
-log(c) bits	=	1/c states	=	c chance

He also waxed poetical about how we are often fooled about probabilities, so it pays considerably to mechanize our calculations regarding those probabilities. It helps even further if we have a formal language into which we can directly translate our real-life word problems, so that we don’t accidentally setup and then solve the wrong problem. That is, we can then move on from debating about interpretations of the problem, and into actual calculation.

• If I have two children and one of them is a girl, what is the probability the other is also a girl? (ans: 1/3)
• If I have two children and the older one is a girl, what is the probability that the younger is also a girl? (ans: 1/2)

He also talked quite a bit on the Bayesian approach to probability, and why it is much nicer than the frequentist approach, because it assumes much less about the world. There is no need for a prior, and your measured probabilities are updated naturally as your knowledge of the world changes.

From this he moved on to providing a proto-language approach to how one would setup and solve these sorts of problems. He co-opted existing computer language constructs to do this. First we notice that in statements like

IF cond THEN this ELSE that ENDIF

the cond is a boolean value. But there’s a priori no reason why we are prevented from interpreting it as a probability, a real value in the range [0,1].

IF 1/2 THEN print(”heads”) ELSE print(”tails”) ENDIF

He quite nicely demonstrated a calculus that gives you the ability to compute the result of such random decision trees. So, for example if you were faced with the Two Envelopes Problem how you could compute the value of a strategy expressed in his probability language.

I really liked the talk because of the way in which it drew upon existing fields and showed a very curious intersection of them. After the talk I asked if he could use this language to calculate an optimum strategy (he said no, he hadn’t done that, but it would be a good area of research) and if he had considered the addition of a switch-case statement (he had, but though he didn’t know how it would look in the language, he quite liked the idea of adding it).

The research paper, a Probability Perspective underlying his talk is available, as is his book, A Practicle Theory of Programming. He also mentioned that he has a grad student that has applied this probability programming to proof of quantum algorithms with much success, and that he’s yet to find a student to implement (write a compiler/interpreter for the language)

Today I decided to send the following email. Usually, when I do such things it doesn’t make any difference. But it still never hurts to try. We’ll see what becomes of my efforts this time.

Dear PZ Myers and richarddawkins.net,

I wanted the following to go personally to Richard Dawkins, but could not find his personal email through websearching (likely with very good reason). I’m uncertain wether he has the opportunity to read every mail sent to richarddawkins.net; So I humbly ask you to forward this (at your own discretion) to the Eminent Professor of Public Understanding of Science. Oh and feel welcome to post this communication publicly, in part or in full. (Comment feedback from either or both of Pharyngula and richarddawkins.net readers would likely be rather informative)

——-
Dear Darwin’s Rottweiler,

On several occasions I’ve heard you mention that you’d like to, or were considering writing a children’s book. I think that this is an astounding idea. I share your views that the uncritical acceptance of religion, and the assumed authority it has over moral issues poisons our culture, and threatens our social progress. I currently think that the primary reason for the perniciousness of religious belief is that it is crammed into the skulls of children before they’ve developed the capacity for critical thinking or other tools of intellectual defense. Children’s books that promulgate the values of the Enlightenment could very well be the best weaponry against religion that we have at our disposal. And it doesn’t even have to appear as an attack!

I would like very much to see a series of children’s books that propagate some of the allegorical tales in science. The stories could cover Newton’s Apple, Galileo and the Tower of Pisa, Friedrich Kekule and the Benzene Ouroboros, Eratosthenes and the Round Earth, Copernicus and Geo-Centrism, Archimedes and the Bathtub, Watson and Crick and their puzzle pieces, Einstein and the light-train, Alexander Fleming and his dirty dishes. Science is replete with heroes that should be celebrated for their hard and tireless brain-work; heroes that used their mind and reason to solve real-world problems; heroes that stood up against dogmatic authority. These stories should celebrate such individual efforts, acknowledge their personal sacrifices, and encourage children to become active participants in growing our collective knowledge. (We should also celebrate supporting roles, not exclusively heroes; since, realistically, that’s where most of us are positioned.)

In my mind many of these stories would be ideal for bedtime. I think it is more important to instill in children the values of science rather than its teachings. If society were to completely lose its scientific knowledge, a social structure that encourages well-thought-out dissent, evidence-based critique, and the importance of experimental repeatability, logic, reason, precision in communication, would be vitally important to regaining that knowledge. The methods of science are more important than the results of science; and children’s stories should draw upon this phenomenon, instilling values rather than dry facts. The very notion that by reason alone we can come to know more about the world and our position in it, is, to me, much more inspiring than anything religion has to offer. And I feel it is a moral obligation to communicate this innately human desire to our children, such that they might learn our methods early and be ably equipped to build upon our work as early as possible. To demonstrate through stories that the best, prooven and reliable method for getting ahead in life, is to use your mind for understanding what you observe around you.

There are so many children’s story books that focus on tales from the bible, that it’s time we created some competition. Most of these books tend to have an overtly moral tone to them; please make every effort to avoid that. Even children can tell when they are being preached to, and they grow to resent such condescension.

I’ve also noticed a wild cry among the populace that science education is faltering in America. I have personal experience that tells me technically minded parents are quite concerned about the current state of affairs, and already make efforts outside of the curriculum to inspire their children in the ways of science and math. Help give these families some tools to teach their children what the education system ignores. I eagerly look forward to any effort you make in this direction, and I’m sure that geek parents everywhere will rejoice in the marketplace once such materials appear.

Inspire them while they’re young!

PS. Thank you (both) for speaking your opinions about issues of religion, and raising our collective consciousness about its uncritical acceptance in our society.

This morning one of my high school friends (Thomas) told me about Clifford Stoll. So I watched his TED conference video. Boy is he animated. Inaddition to having pursued a KGB computer infiltration (an article, book, and NOVA documentary), he enjoys one-sided things, and produces his own glass klein bottles.

There is just no shortage of cool people today.